Part 1

The saga of remodeling an old house. This story really begins back in Minnesota in1998, but there are parts to that tale that are pretty painful, and I’m not sure I can write about them yet. So we’ll fast forward to April 2003. I’d just moved out to South Dakota to start a new job. We’d put our Wisconsin home on the market, and my husband was staying there until the property sold. I started looking for a place out here, and on the Thursday, July 3^rd, the realtor took me to see a small farm, 40 acres with a run down barn, a couple of decent out buildings and a nice sized shop. I wasn’t real impressed with the house, but really liked the rest of the property. Took lots of pics and then headed east on I90 toward Minnesota.

I’d been driving “home” most every weekend, and it wasn’t too bad if I could get through the Twin Cities before rush hour. Otherwise the trip took an hour longer, but I was use to that kind of traffic, I’d been driving in it for years . . .

I showed my husband the pics; we talked about it and decided that we should both go back for a second look. We’d been looking since April, and this property had just come on the market so we didn’t want to miss an opportunity. I knew my realtor was going to be home on the 4^th, so called her early Friday morning, and she said we could see the property on Sat morning. Now I’d just driven from the middle of SD to western WI the day before, but we hopped in the car and headed back west. We made it back to my apartment early enough to watch the fireworks, and then hit the sack. Got up Saturday, packed things up and headed an hour east to meet with the realtor. My husband really looked over the property, said we’d think about it and took off again for WI. Talked it over real good Saturday evening/Sunday morning, and I hopped back in the car and headed west so I could be at work Monday morning. Ok, following all this? That’s over 2,000 miles to look at a house.

Well, we put in an offer, they accepted and two months later it was ours. I won’t go into all the details of the move, but even though we hired to have the horses and tractor hauled, it’s a LOT of work moving from one 40 acre farm to another! If I ever have to move again I’m calling an auctioneer and leaving with nothing but CASH in my pocket.

I’ll tell you a little bit about this house, then I’m off to bed for the night. The original building consisted of one room, about 9’ x 15’. It was a REAL claim shack. We were told that it was originally built about 1875. Then, in the early 1900’s, another “shack” (14’ x 20’) was moved on the property and the two were joined, forming a T. Both the old sections are sitting on large boulders, and there is not even enough room under there for a crawl space. Then around 1925, a two story section was added to the north end the second. I am not sure if this was built on site, or moved here. It’s about 16’ x 22’, and has the sloping ceilings upstairs. The new section is actually sitting on cement footings. Then at some point, the west end of the original section was extended out about 15 feet and a bathroom was added. This “new” section actually has a cellar underneath it, complete with outside cellar door. They converted the old cistern, which was about 5’ from the house, into the septic tank. At some point, they added electricity, and most of the wiring in those areas of the house is quite old.

THEN at some point they put a porch off the oldest section. It’s about the same size, and they built it using the cement sidewalk as a foundation. And as typical, it got framed in and converted to living space (was the laundry room and side entry way). Ok, at some point they ALSO added another porch off the east side of the second addition – at least this one is on a real foundation, and again, it got closed up and converted to living space. And every time they’d add on, the roof line would get changed, so we have roofs over roofs, as they would go from the existing peak out to the new perimeter wall. It may sound pretty neat, until you go to re-roof the mess!

That’s enough for tonight. I’ll add one side note that some might find interesting. We actually didn’t close on selling our WI place until the end of April 2004, so for 8 months we owned two 40 acres spreads, my husband lived on one WI, and I lived on the other in SD. It was the very first time in my entire 43 years that I lived alone, but that is a different story.

Thanks for “listening”

Cathy

¶ 7:42 PM